Astronomy and the use of a telescope is one of the few hobbies that you can never know everything and you will always have something new to learn. This is partly due to the fact that every day we learn more about astronomy and there is always a bigger and better telescope out there. Amateur astronomy is also amazing because even amateur astronomers make discoveries about the cosmos, and they don’t even always use big, expensive telescopes. Even a medium-sized telescope is ideal for making discoveries. There are countless examples of amateur astronomers making discoveries that have benefited the scientific community as a whole.
There are so many different aspects to astronomy as well. There are radio telescopes, gamma-ray telescopes, and the ever-famous visible-light telescopes. Radio telescopes can be used in an array that gives the telescope viewing power equal to the distance between the radio antennas. The capacity of these radio telescopes is amazing. The most famous version, the visible-light telescope, gives you a view exactly like your eye would see the night sky. Something like the Hubble Space Telescope sees space in visible light. Hubble has even been able to observe the same piece of sky for 11 days in a row, giving it 11 days of light gathering and Hubble was able to give us the ultra deep field. It was a piece of dark sky that ended up having thousands and thousands of galaxies.
On the ground, we are beginning to be able to build telescopes that have a much better ability to see observable light thanks to a technique called adaptive optics. This is a technique where the mirror has the ability to change shape depending on the movement of the atmosphere. The atmosphere is the biggest problem for ground-based telescopes, so they try to build them high on mountains in dry areas to avoid as much of the atmosphere as possible. But for the rest of the atmosphere, the telescope has to see into space, they shoot a laser into the atmosphere that tells them what motion is going on, and the telescope’s mirror can compensate for that. It’s like a pair of adaptable glasses.
But like I said, even at the amateur astronomy level, using a telescope is an amazing hobby that shows you space like you’ve never seen it before.